OIL HUNT AT TOP OF THE WORLD

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On the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean, where snow drifts are four stories high and the white horizon is limitless, oil explorers are grappling with a leading international energy question: At a time of falling oil prices, are exceptionally high-cost hydrocarbon resources still worth the price?

Nowhere is the issue posed more starkly than at Rea Point, Northwest Territories, 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, a staging point for the northernmost drilling in the world. Temperatures regularly plunge 50 degrees below zero; at drilling sites, water depths beneath six feet of constantly shifting ice sometimes reach a third of a mile, and pitch darkness reigns for nearly three winter months, the peak of the wildcatting season. Satellites Study Ice

Expenses are astronomical. It costs up to $23 million to drill an offshore well in this region, more than 10 times the cost in the Gulf of Mexico. A barrel of oil costing $1 to pump in Saudi Arabia could be 30 times as high at Rea Point.

The reason, in part, is a technology rivaling science fiction. Drillers have learned to use satellites to locate the least mobile ice formations and to develop minute-by-minute radio surveillance techniques to detect tiny movements in surface ice while drilling.

They have invented a means to produce oil and gas at the floor of the ocean through depths as great as 1,800 feet, and they have perfected a diving suit not requiring the days of compression and decompression needed with conventional suits. And plans are afoot for icebreaker tankers and huge submarines to take oil and liquefied natural gas to market.

The cost of all this did not seem the most important consideration in the 1970's; worried policy makers in virtually every oil importing country tended to view the very availability of energy as more crucial than its price. In any case, the energy bill seemed certain to go up anyway. The Canadian Government, for example, based its energy forecasts on an oil price of about $70 (United States) a barrel by 1986.

Now, under the weight of the ample supplies that have resulted from the worldwide recession, conservation and gains in efficiency, the price of oil and competing fuels has been eroding for more than two years; Britain, Norway and Nigeria recently cut their oil prices further, with other producers expected to follow, and many analysts foresee scant likelihood of price increases over the next five years. Pressure 'Downward'

The president of one major oil company is privately fretting that the price of a barrel of oil may dip below $20 from a current level of about $30, which itself is a drop of more than $5 in two years.

For the Arctic exploration effort to make any sense at Rea Point, in the neighborhood of the magnetic North Pole, it seems necessary to believe two things: first, that the oil glut - even if it lasts for the decade - will ultimately be ended by economic resurgence, geological limits and worldwide population growth, and second, that a major supply disruption, as occurred twice in the 1970's, has a good chance of recurring.

''All you have to do is have one of those Arab nations knock off another one, and you're back in the soup again,'' said Charles R. Hetherington, president of Panarctic Oils Ltd., which is performing all the exploration in the High Arctic, an area defined as that part of the world north of the 70th parallel.

Others at least partly disagree about the value of the Arctic effort. Walter J. Levy, the international energy consultant, said that just the cost of shipping oil and gas from the Arctic made it ''dubious economically.''

''Certainly, I wouldn't put my money into it,'' Mr. Levy said of the Panarctic venture. A top planner for one of the world's biggest oil companies expresses similar reservations. ''Is it possible that these Arctic discoveries are going to be so costly that synthetics will be less expensive in 1995?'' he asked. Earlier Challenges

From the deserts of Arabia to the jungles of Venezuela, however, the oil industry has acquired the habit of making big money from big challenges. In the barren Arctic region, oil interest has been keen. Many in the industry, including Exxon and Societe Nationale Elf Aquitaine, drilled onshore wells in the 1960's and early 1970's.

Gradually, they retreated. But Panarctic stayed, pushing into ever more treacherous areas. The company was created 14 years ago as a joint venture of the Canadian Government and about 30 largely Canadian companies to explore the High Arctic. Today, it is the only company still operating there.

In almost any other part of the world, the results would seem dazzling. Panarctic and its partners, in drilling 150 wells, have found more than 18 trillion cubic feet of gas and encouraging amounts of crude oil. (The company has not estimated the total reserves in the area, however, although it feels the outlook is very promising.) The problem is the immense expense of getting the hydrocarbons out of the ground and shipping them. Not a cent has been made in 14 years of High Arctic drilling, while nearly $1 billion has been spent.

''A 20-barrel-a-day well just outside of Houston looks terrific,'' a major oil company expert said. ''In Arctic conditions, a 2,000-barrel-a-day well may not be of much interest.'' A Political Mission

But strict commercial criteria do not apply to Panarctic. It is 53 percent owned by Petro-Canada, the Canadian national oil company, and it is a stated instrument of Government policy. As such, Panarctic serves a political mission: High Arctic drilling is the only regular Canadian activity in that region and hence represents a tangible assertion of sovereignty over Canadian territory adjacent to the Soviet Union into which Soviet exploration teams have sometimes ranged, to the irritation of Ottawa.

Canada also considers it worthwhile to establish an inventory of energy resources to help it determine the best manner and rate of exploitation.

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Although oil and gas have been found in much of the Arctic drilling, the wells have all been plugged, classified as ''expendable wildcats,'' and written off as so much intellectual capital that might be useful in the future.

''You're just drilling for information,'' said Lindsay J. Franklin, Panarctic's vice president of operations. In recent years, the data have been greatly expanded as a result of Panarctic's 1974 venture offshore, where two-thirds of the company's nearly six million acres of drilling leases are situated.

From the first timid efforts, using a very light land rig to drill a known field in shallow water, Panarctic has learned to take a large, sophisticated rig over very deep water to drill into the unknown. As a consequence, its reserve estimates have grown rapidly.

The chief difficulty of these offshore operations is directly related to the fact that ice melts. Creating a Platform

In November, when the ice is two feet thick, helicopters carry the first crews and some small equipment to the selected High Arctic drilling site. In total darkness and some of the harshest weather in the world, they begin flooding the area that will support the fourmillion-pound drilling rig, the idea being to create a platform 23 feet thick, 90 percent of which is under water. They also begin building a 1,500-foot landing strip for Twin Otter planes, the propeller-powered workhorses of the Arctic oil patch.

As the flooding continues, workers lengthen the runway to 6,000 feet, permitting ponderous Hercules transport planes to land. When the ice is five feet thick, the Hercules arrive with the rig in about 120 parts. Once the rig is in place, usually by early January, drilling is pressed at a rapid pace so that it can be completed by the end of April, when the rig must be removed in advance of the spring melt.

It is hard, lonely work. Several years ago, a bulldozer operator drove his machine through a hole in the ice and it sank to the bottom. Somehow, he swam to the surface and, resembling a human icicle, walked nearly a quarter mile to the camp, where he quit on the spot. In 1974, a plane crashed, killing 33 people.

The men, who live in prefabricated housing, work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. For recreation, they watch satellite-transmitted television, or play table tennis or cards. The food is good, with four meals a day available. Women and families are at least 1,800 miles away. And the roustabouts' moans at seeing actresses in bikinis on television sound agonizingly sincere. ''I'm just about burned out,'' one worker sighed, finishing a two-week Arctic stint, to be followed by one week off, the standard routine. 'You Get No Warning'

The greatest danger is that the surface ice might buckle as a result of winds, currents and tides. ''The worry is the sudden, traumatic movements of ice,'' Mr. Franklin said. ''It's like an earthquake; you get no warning.''

Panarctic seems to be winning its fight against the elements. Any doubt about the company's outlook arises from the dearth of buyers for its gas.

One possibility - the Arctic Pilot Project, under which gas would be liquefied and shipped to eastern Canada, the United States or Europe - was postponed by the Canadian regulatory authorities last September because of the absence of a guaranteed market. A bigger project, the Polar Gas Pipeline, has also been delayed.

Panarctic faces other obstacles as well. Environmentalists have been attacking it since a gas well lurched out of control in 1970, shooting up flames visible 300 miles away. Eskimo Complaints

Panarctic was also fined $150,000 for dumping empty oil drums, ash cans, scrap metal, sheets of plastic and a battered pickup truck, among other things, through a hole in the Arctic ice. Eskimo groups complain that the Arctic Pilot Project would leave impassable cracks in the ice, scaring away seals and whales, and increasing the possibility of oil spills.

But the greatest problems are economic, and even Mr. Franklin conceded that the infusions of money by shareholder companies ''can't go on forever'' if profits do not materialize.

The optimistic view, from Panarctic's perspective, is that both transportation projects have simply been slowed a bit. According to such an interpretation, the Arctic Pilot Project might get under way in 1988 rather than 1985, as originally planned; the Polar Pipeline would become a reality in the late 1990's, rather than 1992.

At the drilling site 15 miles west of Lougheed Island, the mood is decidedly bearish because of falling oil prices, which most people here believe will sink further.

''Those OPEC guys might cut the price to $15 - it could be a long summer,'' said a grease-stained roughneck as he shoveled a big chunk of roast pork onto his fork in the drilling camp cafeteria. Outside, it was 38 degrees below zero and dark as a cave.

A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 1983, on Page D00001 of the National edition with the headline: OIL HUNT AT TOP OF THE WORLD. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe